


Boyscout

by Sunhawk16



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-05 23:44:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14629551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunhawk16/pseuds/Sunhawk16
Summary: Well... this one isn't particularly angsty at least, but I don't guarantee the quality. I started this ages ago and then... forgot where I was going. Not a clue what the inspiration was. Just... hard stop. Then it sat for oh... maybe a couple of years. So I tried to jump start it, and hoped it would find a point. But instead it just sort of wandered around and fell on its face. >_> But it was actually one of the longer things I had so... here you go! Aren't you excited to read it?? :DHeero POV.  Posted on day 8 of the 12 days of Christmas 2017.





	Boyscout

**Author's Note:**

> Well... this one isn't particularly angsty at least, but I don't guarantee the quality. I started this ages ago and then... forgot where I was going. Not a clue what the inspiration was. Just... hard stop. Then it sat for oh... maybe a couple of years. So I tried to jump start it, and hoped it would find a point. But instead it just sort of wandered around and fell on its face. >_> But it was actually one of the longer things I had so... here you go! Aren't you excited to read it?? :D   
> Heero POV. Posted on day 8 of the 12 days of Christmas 2017.

It was a tube of lube this time, sitting front and center on the shelf in my locker. I gusted out a purely internal sigh and like the last five times, completely ignored it. For all the good it did. I wouldn’t have thought a bunch of macho Preventers agents could ever be accusing of giggling like twelve year old girls… but that’s what several of them did.

I utterly refused to acknowledge the existence of the damn thing, refused to give them the show they were obviously hoping for. I figured that sooner or later, it would get old and they’d find something else to do with their spare time, but so far… no luck.

When Duo and I had moved in together there had not been a lot of backlash from our friends or co-workers. We weren’t living in the twentieth century, after all, but after a couple of months these little… ‘jokes’ had begun to appear. A pair of boxers with little hearts all over them. A dildo. A pair of edible underwear. A gee-string. A paperback book of sex positions for gay couples. And now the lube.

So very amusing. Watch me laugh. So glad I didn’t miss the high school experience after all.

I dealt with it the only way I knew how… I ignored the whole thing like it was invisible. Though I did wonder sometimes why it was always my locker and never Duo’s.

The man in question came into the room then, leaving off a discussion of something music related as he stopped in front of his locker and Webster walked on around the corner to his own. I saw Duo glance my way out of the corner of my eye and sighed when I saw the tiny frown that told me he’d noticed my… tension.

He dumped his gear in the bottom of his locker and stepped over while he unknotted his tie. I saw him open his mouth to ask me if I was all right, and didn’t much want to get into it, so I pointedly looked at the lube to draw his own gaze that way. His frown deepened.

‘What did you want to do for dinner tonight?’ I tried, hoping he’d follow my lead and we’d just leave the discussion for later.

‘Wufei was telling me about a new place out on Route 49 I thought we could try,’ he said casually, and the frown was gone. But he reached into my locker and picked up the gaudy colored tube. ‘Why Heero,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Where did this come from?’

I glared, just to let him know I wasn’t happy, and ground out, ‘I would not know.’

Somewhere down the line of lockers, there were a couple of those muffled snickers.

‘A secret admirer?’ Duo said, his tone weirdly bright and curious, and he turned to the room at large. ‘Now which of these fine ladies would be leaving you gifts?’

Somehow, I was pretty sure that was not the intended interpretation. I had the urge to hush him and haul him out of there, but I knew that tone of voice and knew that an overly friendly Duo Maxwell was anything but. He would not be deterred now. Besides, my reacting would only feed the fire.

He waved the stupid tube of lube in the air and while he was grinning widely, his eyes were watching with a raptor’s coldness.

There were titters and snickers. Somebody took umbrage to the ‘ladies’ tag. Somebody else made a lube joke. And then Duo homed in on something I didn’t catch, and began making his way across the room.

‘Greene?’ He said, with mock surprise. ‘Really?’

The muffled snickers weren’t muffled anymore and not really just snickers anyway.

Greene mumbled something and managed to produce a blush that was pretty darn incriminating. I would not have guessed, but then I suppose it’s true what they say about it always being the quiet ones.

‘Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy,’ Duo chided, shaking the tube like a teacher brandishing the dreaded ruler. ‘I would not have thought it of you… going after a man in a committed relationship? Really?’

He was a bit more in dear Jimmy’s personal space than was polite, but I suppose polite had gone out the window ages ago. I think Greene would have retreated, but he was trapped between his open locker door, the bench, and… Duo.

‘Not going after anybody, Maxwell!’ he finally snapped and tried to go back to changing to go home, but suddenly seemed to have a problem with continuing to undress that close to a man with a tube of lube in his hand.

I was somewhat appalled to find myself grinning, and made myself stop.

I don’t think there was anybody left in the locker room that was bothering to muffle the laughter.

‘Don’t go all shy now, Jimmy,’ Duo said, and brandished the tube again, waving it in Greene’s face pointedly. ‘There aren’t a lot of interpretations to one guy leaving this for another guy.’

Greene sputtered and verbally staggered around, tossing out words that were only vaguely connected. It was… bizarre to watch. Intellectually, I could see what Duo was doing… leaning in slightly, one hand on hip and elbows out, still displaying the dumb lube front and center. Keeping it moving and making it attention grabbing. All his body language signals were intimidating… making himself take up more space, pressing the edges of boundaries, flirting with, but not quite crossing the line of ‘aggressive’. But his tone was… almost teasing. He was baiting Greene, sure, but he was somehow keeping it… funny.

I glanced around, and there weren’t a lot of the guys who weren’t watching it play out, and laughing at the whole display. Nobody seemed nervous, or concerned that there was about to be a fight. It was uncanny how fast they had gone from laughing at me, to laughing at Greene.

‘It was a fucking joke, ok?’ Greene finally snapped, snatching the lube away from Duo to get it out of his face, I think, but then couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it as he couldn’t get around his locker door to go throw it away, without stepping toward Duo.

‘Well ‘fucking’ was kind of the obvious adjective,’ Duo pointed out reasonably, ‘but I’m not sure I get the joke, Jimmy.’

Greene must have decided about then that he needed to cut his losses and just get the hell out of Dodge. He slapped the lube down on the shelf in his locker just to get it out of his hand I think, and the cap popped off from the force, squirting a liberal amount of goo across the shelf. The two guys who happened to be at the right vantage to see it, about busted a gut laughing. If I’d thought Greene was red in the face before, he escalated to a whole new level then.

Duo did not laugh, did not even seem to notice, he just kept standing there, both hands on hips now that he didn’t need one for lube waving, head cocked to the side and seemed to be waiting to have the joke explained.

I was starting to doubt the wisdom of this confrontation. Greene was going from embarrassed to angry, and it’s been my experience that anger tends to fester and come out in other places. I am generally not opposed to the direct approach to a problem, but most of my problems involved things like disarming bombs, or destroying mobile suits. This sort of… group dynamic business was a different level of problem.

Then behind me I heard the locker room door open and all of a sudden, the people facing that way were finding reasons to finish getting ready to go home. I didn’t have to turn around and look to know that Commander Merquis had just walked into the room. Across the aisle, Duo didn’t give Greene any ground, so while most of the rest of our audience faded into the woodwork, Duo, Greene and I just kept standing there.

‘Evening, gentlemen,’ the Commander said as he made his way down the row toward his own locker. I’d never quite understood why the man bothered to keep one… he had an office that he could just about put the whole locker room into. It hardly seemed necessary.

‘Evening Commander,’ I replied automatically, as did most of the rest of those of us who hadn’t already beaten a hasty retreat.

‘Hey there, Boss,’ Duo called, and it made Merquis give him more than the passing nod he’d given everybody else.

I could see him taking in the strange position Duo and Green were in, and (I would certainly hope) the apocalyptic shade of Greene’s face.

‘Problem, Agents?’ the Commander asked in a tone that said there couldn’t possibly be. Not with his agents. Not in his locker room.

Greene was losing the red and the anger and starting to look nervous. The Commander’s dating preferences were no secret. I had a feeling he wouldn’t get the joke either

Duo just waved a negligent hand. ‘Nope,’ he said breezily. ‘Just shooting the shit. Talking about the weekend.’

‘Uh huh,’ Merquis said without a lot of conviction, but I noticed he was looking past the both of them into Greene’s open locker. Greene and Duo both refused to follow that gaze, just kept standing there staring at him. It kind of made me aware that I was just standing and staring too, and decided that probably wasn’t making things look any more innocent than they actually were. I turned back to my locker. The four of us were the only ones left within a hundred yard radius.

While I swapped my uniform shirt for my street clothes, I listened intently as Duo said, ‘Yep. Jimmy here was just telling me about a new restaurant, weren’t you Jimmy?’

Greene managed to sputter out an agreement that was so obviously fake he might as well have just admitted that they were in the middle of… an argument? Disagreement? Confrontation? Whatever the hell you’d want to call what was going on.

It took the Commander a long moment before he gave them an oddly amused sounding, ‘Well, carry on then,’ before he moved on down the line and around the corner to where his locker was located.

‘So it’s out on 49, you say?’ Duo purred in an only slightly over-loud voice. I turned to look to see that he’d dropped an arm around Greene’s shoulders for the show they’d put on for Merquis and he was just moving it away.

Greene looked… weird. Pissed and relieved and like he couldn’t figure out what in the hell had just happened. ‘Yeah,’ he finally sputtered out and didn’t manage to keep his voice to only slightly over-loud. More like cringe-worthy loud. ‘Yeah… 49. New place.’

Duo still wasn’t getting out of the personal space zone, and Greene wasn’t in a position to do a thing about it with our boss just around the corner and well within ear shot. Not without bringing the whole sordid adventure out in the open. Something he was obviously trying to avoid like a bad case of the plague.

We all heard it when the Commander’s locker door clicked and squeaked as it opened. Duo leaned in just a bit more, and smiled the wide, scary smile he can manage. ‘So… jokes over now, huh Jim?’

Greene couldn’t quite help an aborted little glance to the side, like he could see if the Commander was listening through a double row of lockers. ‘Jeez, Maxwell,’ he muttered, ‘no damn sense of humor…’

‘Oh,’ Duo grinned widely, showing lots of teeth. ‘You really don’t want to see my sense of humor come out, Jimmy… you really don’t.’

As a threat, it was… weird, but it somehow seemed to signal an end to the whole escapade and we all three went back to getting ready to go home. Greene was the first one gone, and he ended up just taking his street clothes with him. Never did bother to clean up the lube.

‘So, want to give this new place a try?’ Duo asked cheerfully, once he was changed, and we were walking out together.

‘Suppose so,’ I replied, mostly for the sake of hypothetically listening ears, because it really wasn’t what was on my mind.

Out in the hall, away from the locker room, the Commander, Greene, and any other possible listening ears, Duo lost the smile. ‘Heero,’ he scolded almost gently, ‘why didn’t you tell me you were being harassed?’

Harassed? I tried the word out; it wasn’t one I’d been using for the situation when I thought about it, but I suppose it might fit. ‘I was trying to ignore it,’ I grumbled, having to reach back a little bit to remember that I was annoyed with him for not following my lead. ‘They’d have gotten tired of it eventually, when they didn’t get a reaction.’

We had been walking side by side down the hall, and the conversation paused for a moment when we came to the stairwell and had to go single file through the door. Duo sighed heavily, but we dropped it while we climbed up to the first floor, not able to tell if somebody else might not be on the stairs somewhere above us.

He waited, in fact, until we made our way through the first floor and were outside completely, walking beside each other again on the front steps.

‘You’ve never really dealt with this sort of…’ he waved his hand vaguely, hunting for the right word for a second, ‘group interaction, have you?’

I snorted, not bothering to point out that prior to our current job with the Preventers, I’d been something of a lone operative for as far back as I could remember.

He sighed again, and moved in close enough to slip his arm around my shoulders, giving me a little squeeze. ‘Heero, they were getting a reaction. They were getting a kick out of watching you try to ignore the stupid thing. It would have just escalated.’

‘I actually thought the lube was a step back…’ I muttered before I thought better of it, and the arm around my shoulders kind of went still.

‘Heero,’ he asked cautiously, almost as though he didn’t really want to know the answer, ‘just how long has this been going on?’

I sighed, thought to shrug, but really couldn’t without it seeming like I was trying to shrug him off. ‘Couple months,’ I confessed.

He was quiet a long time, we’d almost reached the car before he finally said. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

I’d figured we’d get back to that part since I’d sort of dodged the point earlier, so I decided to just come out with it. ‘I didn’t want a scene.’ We’d stopped beside the car and he dropped his arm away so we were facing each other at that point. Since he could see it, I gave him a little frown to remind him that I’d gotten the very scene I’d not wanted.

He chuckled, but it wasn’t very sheepish. ‘It was going to keep happening until there was a scene. ‘ We stared at each other for a minute, but then he sort of tilted his head at the car and I acquiesced… might as well take the conversation on the road.

We climbed in and I started it up while I thought about my reply, and he let me mull it over.

‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ I finally told him. ‘I never reacted. I never even acted like I saw the things. Threw them away in the outside dumpster when no one was around to see it. Why didn’t they get bored?’

‘They were getting their jollies seeing how far they could push before you broke,’ he said, and I could feel him watching me. ‘Though I shouldn’t say ‘they’, I’m pretty sure it was all Greene.’

I glared at the road ahead of us and had to disagree. ‘There were sure enough of them laughing.’

Duo chuckled darkly. ‘Oh, isn’t a one of them that will pass up a free show if it’s going to present itself, but I think Greene was the only perp.’

It reminded me that I’d wondered what had led him to that decision. ‘What gave him away?’

‘He’s a suck poker player?’ he said, but then relented. ‘He was the only one not just standing there watching me. He was trying a little too hard to be uninvolved.’

‘That’s a bit slim to pin an accusation on,’ I had to tell him, wondering why Greene had never tried to deny it.

‘Well,’ he confessed, ‘once I really started pushing, I caught a couple of the guys sneaking glances at him to see his reaction.

I grunted. I’d missed that. Or maybe I’d been as caught up in watching Duo as the rest of them.

‘And when I confronted him, acting so sure of it… he just assumed that somebody had pointed him out behind his back.’

We drove in silence for a bit while he let me consider the situation. I ran the whole thing through my head again and really… it still didn’t make any sense.

‘So what the hell was the damn point?’ I finally blurted and it made Duo laugh.

‘It really was a joke of sorts,’ he replied and I spared him a look that told him the humor was… lacking. ‘I didn’t say a good joke,’ he amended. ‘You have to think of any large group of people as a sort of… herd, if you will. There’s a pecking order. Greene was trying to earn himself some cheap… group approval.’

Kind of made me wonder about the group if that sort of behavior was going to be… approved of. But that brought another question to mind so I went ahead and voiced it.

‘Why me?’ I asked, working my hands against the steering wheel and feeling like I was whining. ‘I mean… I assume it was our relationship that brought this on, so… why was it never you?’

It took him a second to answer and I suspected there was some line that didn’t get delivered. ‘Oh, it probably wasn’t really our relationship that sparked it,’ he finally said. ‘It was just a convenient target. It’s that pecking order business. You’re almost always in the top spots in all the rankings. You’re kind of like… Wyatt Earp.’

Well, that certainly made it all clear. ‘Wyatt who?’ I had to ask, and he chuckled.

‘Sorry,’ he said, and gave me a look that was amused and affectionate all rolled into one. Kind of helped me not feel quite so embarrassed for being… pop culturally illiterate. ‘Ancient Earth history. The idea is… basically… you have a guy who is the best fighter in the world, and every would-be fighter out there wants to give him a go, to try to prove themselves.’

I grunted and had to think about it for a minute. ‘So… wouldn’t it make more sense for Greene to have challenged me on the track or something?’

That got me an actual full blown laugh. ‘Oh hell no! He wouldn’t stand a chance and he knows it. But you’re still the organization’s number one agent. Pulling a joke over on you is sort of like… counting coup.’

That term I’d heard before, at least. Though it didn’t seem all that apt; where was there any bravery in stuffing inappropriate objects in another person’s locker? Unless anybody thought there was some possibility that I might have kicked his ass over it? That certainly wasn’t going to happen, and according to Duo my own method of dealing with it by ignoring it wasn’t right either, so…

‘Ok, so just what the hell was the right damn response?’ I finally demanded, tired of trying to make the whole stupid thing make any sense. Sometimes being a lone operative was a hell of a lot easier than dealing with people.

It made him lose that smile he’d been wearing, and he huffed out a sigh, dropping his head back against the seat. It kind of surprised me that he really seemed to be mulling it over. He’d been damned full of answers so far, I’d expected him to have one ready for this question too.

I knew he’d answer me when he had it worked out, so I left him alone and concentrated on my driving. By that time we were almost home anyway, so he might have just been waiting until we were inside the apartment, not wanting to have another one of those broken up conversations as we made our way across the parking lot.

And indeed, the topic stayed dropped as I pulled into my spot and parked next to Duo’s truck. We got out and as we made our way toward our front door, he dropped a companionable arm around me again, and I knew he was feeling protective.

He was still kicking his shoes off after we’d entered the sanctuary of the apartment when he finally seemed to have worked out what he wanted to say.

‘Obviously,’ he mused, ‘you witnessed what I considered the right response. But…’ and here he hesitated, turning to watch me while I left my own shoes parked beside his, toeing them into alignment.

‘But?’ I prompted when that hesitation grew a bit long.

He sighed and rubbed a hand across the back of his neck in a gesture I knew meant he was flirting with the edges of something that he wasn’t comfortable saying. But he said it anyway.

‘I don’t think you could have handled it the same way.’

I snorted. ‘You think?’

His discomfort eased and he smiled at me before turning to lead the way into the kitchen.

‘So walk me through just how you handled it,’ I suggested. ‘I got the intimidation factor… I got calling him out in front of everybody, but… what was that business with the Commander?’

Duo got down the cutting board while I went for a frying pan and I heard him sigh. ‘The Commander was a convenient but unforeseen… uh… complication. He was a good ten minutes earlier than he usually comes in.’

I snorted and almost commented on his awareness of the Commander’s schedule, but decided it would just derail things. ‘What exactly is a convenient complication?’

It made him laugh. ‘Convenient because it gave me a perfect way to wrap things up, on a better note than just simple intimidation, but complicated because there was no guarantee Zechs would go along with me.’

I straightened to look over the refrigerator door at him. ‘And did he?’

He grinned widely, making the two handed catch gesture, and I tossed him the broccoli. ‘Oh, he wasn’t buying any of that buddy-buddy crap, and he saw the mess in Greene’s locker. He knew he’d walked into the middle of something, but decided to stay out of it.’

I took the package of chicken I’d been after and returned to the stove. ‘And how was that better than simple intimidation?’

He sighed again, mulling it over while broccoli fell to his knife. ‘I wanted to keep it… light?’ he hesitated, and glanced at me. ‘You know what I mean? It was far from ‘light’, but I wasn’t going to just beat the shit out of him. The whole show was as much for the rest of the room as him.’

‘You lost me,’ I confessed, slicing off chunks of chicken and feeding them to the pan. ‘If he was the only perp… what difference did anybody else make?’

‘Herd mentality,’ he said and there was a twist to his voice that said he didn’t really approve of this mentality. ‘If I’d just lost my temper and gone after him, then he became the victim and it would have just won him sympathy.’

‘He was harassing me, and getting caught wins him sympathy?’ I had to ask, testing out that word he’d used earlier. It did kind of feel like the right word, now that he’d offered it.

‘That Maxwell just can’t take a joke,’ he said in a high, mocking voice obviously meant to mimic Greene and/or half the rest of the squad. ‘Poor Greene, just trying to joke around with the Gundam pilots, but you know how they are.’

I didn’t really know how we were, but that seemed like a rabbit hole of a topic and I decided to keep us from wandering down it until another time.

‘So how does the Commander factor in?’

‘Oh, that’s the best part,’ Duo was grinning again, the sour expression he’d worn while hypothesizing probable gossip gone already. ‘Now Greene owes me. I could have ratted him out. Could have told Zechs exactly what he’d walked into the middle of, and I’m sure his sympathies would have been with us. But I covered it up, and kept Greene from a possible write-up, not to mention a trip through the land of sensitivity training. So, ergo… he owes me.’

That took me a few minutes to roll around in my head. If this was ‘herd mentality’, I was starting to think the herd should just be put down. Shouldn’t Preventer agents think independently? We should not be a herd. We should be… above that.

‘Heero,’ Duo said gently, perhaps reading the look on my face, ‘you remember back when we first started dating? How you felt when Hilde showed up and made that last ditch campaign to win me over?’

I did not allow my slicing of chicken to turn into chopping. ‘Yes,’ I said shortly.

‘There are some things… some feelings, that run deeper than intellect,’ he explained, still with that gentle tone of voice. ‘Herd mentality… group mentality is like that.’

I hadn’t really wanted to kill her. Exactly.

Apparently, my lizard brain had at least wanted to maim her a bit. I had not acted on the impulse, and had ultimately trusted Duo to handle the situation, but the feeling of almost overwhelming… rage/hatred/jealousy had not been something I would easily forget.

It took me a minute to push the remembered emotion aside and get back on the current track. So our ‘herd mentality’ now involved lizards? Great….

‘All right,’ I finally said, having gotten down to the stage of adding the sauce to the seared chicken, ‘that just brings us back around to the ‘what should I have done’?’

Duo joined me at the stove and tossed the broccoli into the pan, pausing to give me a peck on the cheek before taking the cutting board to the sink to rinse it off.

‘You should have told me what was happening,’ he finally said, with a hint in his voice that told me he suspected it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

‘So you could rescue me?’ I had to ask, and hoped my own hint didn’t sound as petulant outside my head as it did in.

He snorted. ‘You’re hardly a damsel in distress.’

I waited until he appeared at my side again, holding out plates, to deliver the half-hearted glare.

‘That’s pretty much what happened, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose,’ he admitted and was quiet a minute while I divided dinner up between the two plates and we adjourned to the table. ‘But if I’d known sooner, we might have been able to work it out another way.’

I dialed the time line back and tried to replay the scene, but it still worked out the same. ‘So you would have just gotten in Greene’s face waving a pair of boxer shorts instead of a tube of lube… I don’t see how we could have handled it any different.’

He blinked at me over a fork-full of dinner. ‘Boxer shorts?’

‘With little red heats all over them, ‘ I growled, a little surprised to find I was having to concentrate to not blush.

He winced. ‘Uh… speaking of; you said the lube was a step back?’

I sighed heavily, but gave in to the inevitable and just gave him the damn list. He whistled softly with a rather shocked look on his face.

‘Damn, but Greene was really pulling out all the stops, huh?’ then I saw his expression change and he went off in a completely different direction. ‘Wonder where on earth a guy like him even got all that stuff without dying of embarrassment?’

Since I had no idea where one went about buying things like heart covered boxer shorts and dildos… I did not speculate. But Duo shook it off pretty quickly anyway.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, seeming to dismiss Greene completely. ‘The point is… we’re a team on and off the field, and we should have dealt with this situation together.’

‘I thought I was keeping it from becoming a situation,’ I grumbled, not really able to help the vaguely guilty feeling that I’d not told him sooner. ‘I thought they’d get bored…’

He snorted, ‘you vastly underestimate the level of stupid the average agent finds entertaining.’

‘Apparently,’ I said dryly. These were the Preventers best and brightest? This was the sort of behavior I’d witnessed in some of the boarding schools we’d used for covers, back in the day. Among people a whole hell of a lot younger than the ‘seasoned professionals’ I thought I was working with.

‘Don’t worry,’ Duo said, his fork paused half way to his mouth. ‘You’ll get the hang of it. I just have an advantage… all those years with the Sweepers. They could be just as… easily entertained.’

I couldn’t help the grumble in my voice when I confessed, ‘It kind of makes me want to quit and go back to working solo. It’s a little embarrassing to think this is the Earth’s Sphere’s elite.’

His chewing paused for just a few seconds while he decided if I was kidding or not.

‘Human nature is pretty universal,’ he reassured me; a thing I did not find reassuring in the slightest.

I frowned at my dinner. ‘There should be a test to weed out the herd beast types.’

He snorted. ‘We wouldn’t have any agents at all.’

I suppose he had a point there; sure hadn’t been anybody in that room that I’d caught not laughing. Maybe the dreaded sensitivity training should be mandatory? Part of the first year curriculum? I didn’t share the thought.

A hand covered my free one where it rested on the table and I looked up into a sympathetic smile. ‘You not being part of the herd is part of what got you singled out.’

‘You’re not part of the herd either,’ I had to point out and that smile that had almost held a hint of sadness suddenly went smug.

‘No… but I can fake it like there’s no tomorrow.’

We went back to our dinner then while I thought that over. I suppose it was true; obviously this round of ‘jokes’ had gone on while Duo hadn’t been around, but I’d seen him laughing at things that I hadn’t really seen any humor in. Maybe Duo hadn’t seen any humor either? Sort of made him the wolf in sheep’s clothing, not to introduce any more animals to our analogy.

‘I can teach you to fake it too,’ he offered gently, after he’d let me mull things for a bit.

I didn’t share the mental image of ravaged sheep.

‘All right,’ I agreed eventually. ‘So lesson one… is this stupid episode over? Is now the time to ignore it? Or come Monday morning, is there something else?’

The grin that came out then was absolutely maniacal. ‘I don’t suppose you still have those boxers?’

‘No, but I’d recognize them if we found them on-line for sale… why?’

‘Oh, I think I’ll be wearing them to work now and again, just to make sure Jimmy remembers his place,’ he said.

‘Well that’s…. uhm… subtle?’ I told him, not real sure I was going to excel at these lessons.

‘Subtle as a brick,’ he agreed. ‘But if you are going to send a message to a herd beast… you speak in herd beast. Every time I wear them, I will get teased by the rest of the squad. And I will tease right back and ‘take the joke’ just fine. And the whole time our friend Jimmy will be sweating bullets that he’s about to get turned in.’

‘And…’ I ventured, making the effort to think it through from the other side, ‘be reminded that he owes you one?’

‘See,’ he said, saluting me with a forked piece of broccoli, ‘you’re already getting the hang of it.’

‘I’m not sure if that makes me feel better,’ I sighed, ‘or just makes me feel like I’ve lost some IQ points somewhere.’

He laughed the laugh that makes his eyes sparkle so I knew I’d really amused him, but when he went back to his dinner, his expression grew thoughtful.

‘Maybe this is just a sign that we need to do something about our reputation,’ he said at length, when all he was looking at was an empty plate. ‘A wake up call, so to speak.’

Since he only half seemed to be talking to me and half seemed to be talking to the china, I didn’t interrupt.

‘I’ve kind of known for a long time that we stand out. Well… of course we stand out. But in some ways not so good. ‘

That harked back to his earlier comment about people knowing how we are. I’d left the comment alone at the time to keep from derailing the conversation, but… we were on that rail now.

‘So just what is our reputation?’

‘Stand-offish. Elitist. Une’s favorites. Pricks,’ he rattled the list off with ease, ‘depending on who’s talking.’

I couldn’t help blinking at him. It was a bit of a shift of my world view. Kind of left me waffling between pissed off and … a little depressed.

‘And we’re going to fix this with heart boxer shorts?’

‘Well,’ he grinned, the kind of lop-sided one that I usually only saw right before we executed some mad maneuver that only stood a fifty-fifty chance of getting us killed, ‘we’ll start with heart boxers and then just wing it from there.’

I sighed and silently wished I could go back in time and just shove James Greene in his damn locker after the appearance of that very first gift of boxers. With said boxers wrapped around his head. In some ways, the war had been so much easier to deal with. A ‘reputation’ was not something I would ever have given a second thought to. My focus since the war had been on training and missions and doing the job. If you were good at your job, why did it not just follow that your reputation would be good? Assuming you did not make a habit of punching your fellow agents. What the hell more was required?

‘Don’t look so defeated,’ Duo commiserated, taking my hand again. ‘I shouldn’t have let this go so long. I knew it was there under the surface, but I didn’t know it had bubbled up in your face. We’ll fix this… together.’

We were back around to that part where I had not confided in him, and I tried to look at it as… looking for a good informant when working in a different culture, instead of needing rescued.

‘Together,’ I conceded and it got me a warm smile and a squeeze from that hand over mine.

I just hoped we weren’t doing anything with g-strings or dildos….


End file.
